Overrating the Media

If there’s one thing I disagree with much of the LGM community about, it’s the role of the media in our current crisis. That’s not because I think the media is good. I don’t. It’s that I think the media naturally acts according to their class interest and always has. So often, I see in comments here, or on social media, people wish that a liberal billionaire could build an alternative media organization. There are so many problems with this. First, there are no good billionaires. Well, McKenzie Scott might be one, but she thinks it’s stupid to be a billionaire herself. In any case, even Warren Buffett is bad when it comes to unions, for example. This fantasy is just that. It will never happen. Second and relatedly, billionaires act for their class interests. What Bezos is doing is exactly what most billionaires would do. Sure, he might be a special kind of scumbag, but basically he’s doing what the rich do.

But third and far more important is that the state of the media simply doesn’t matter much. Klein has a piece on this and makes they key point that Democrats win voters who pay a lot of attention to the media. We might think the media sucks, and maybe it does, but the point is that the reason Democrats are losing is not because the media is bad. Yes, Fox News is out there, but again, the evidence is that Democrats win among big news watchers.

As always, the issue in American politics is the vast numbers of people who don’t pay attention, and that includes not paying the first bit of attention to media stories. Rather, it seems that Democrats are completely missing the new media that actually touches these people. Again, Klein:

To the Trumpian right, mastering social media — and attention, generally — means being, yourself, a dominant and relentless presence on social media and YouTube and podcasts, as Trump and JD Vance and Elon Musk all are. It’s the politician-as-influencer, not the politician-as-press-shop. There are Democrats who do this too, like A.O.C., but they are rare.

Biden has no authentic relationship with social media, nor does Harris. They treat it cautiously, preferring to make fewer mistakes, even if that means commanding less attention. Since the election, I have heard no end of Democrats lament their “media problem,” and I’ve found the language telling. Democrats won voters who consume heavy amounts of political news, but they lost voters who don’t follow the news at all. What Democrats have is an attention problem, not a media problem, and it stems partly from the fact that they still treat attention as something the media controls rather than as something they have to fight for themselves.

I am not sure, in the long run, it will benefit Republicans to be so tied to Elon Musk’s X. The politics that Democrats absorbed from Twitter in 2020 hurt them in 2024. Politicians who are too in touch with their online stans lose touch with normal voters. Their sense of the public — who it is, what it wants — deforms.

But social media is humanity’s vibes machine, at least for now, and Republicans have invested more in it than Democrats have, with Musk’s purchase of Twitter sitting at the apex of that project. And so the Trumpist right has gained disproportionate influence over vibes.

This feels right to me, or more right than blaming a shitty New York Times column.

Now, I know nothing about Tik Tok, except that it sounds dumb to me. But what do I know? I only know one thing–I don’t matter. In fact, I’d argue that if everyone remembered that their personal preferences and in fact their life is completely irrelevant to larger issues, we’d all be better off. So my only personal opinions about new social media really don’t matter. What I do know is that for some reason, Tik Tok is how young people live their lives. Completely irrespective of whether the nation should ban Tik Tok (and the arguments to do so seem strong to me), the larger point here is that Democrats have to figure out how to appeal to young people in the forums that they use. And the olds just flat out suck at this (hello, old union leaders afraid of letting their young staffers loose on social media!). Outside of AOC, I see no evidence that Democrats are doing anything useful at all to reach out to this vast unwashed. These people aren’t reading the New York Times and they aren’t watching Fox News, yet they are voting. Trump and Dana White and Musk and etc are all over social media and people find them hilarious. We’d probably be doing a much better job of figuring out the future of the Democratic Party by working out this issue than complaining about another Washington Post framing.

But that’s likely to be unpopular around here because the average age here is about 73 and everyone here probably has little to nothing useful to say about the future of the Democratic Party, including me. But we do need to rethink the entire definition of news media to start and the less we olds know about the technology, probably the more important it is and the more we obsess about some given site or newspaper or network, the less important it probably is.

At the very least though, I’d like to see people merging their critiques of the traditional media with the fact that people who pay attention to this already vote for Democrats.